


nothing else about the place

by trell (qunlat)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Post-Borderlands 3, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:47:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26689159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: Fiona returns to Promethea after the war.(Or: why she left, and why she had to come back.)
Relationships: Fiona/Rhys (Borderlands)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 67





	nothing else about the place

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the ECHO Log _The search for a friend disappeared_ , which can be found in Atlas HQ.
>
>> **RHYS:** Zer0 . . . tell me you found something. Anything at all?
>> 
>> **ZER0:** My spies are searching / but we have come up empty. / There’s no sign of her.
>> 
>> **RHYS:** Damn it! Where the hell . . . I’ve been so busy with this stupid war, maybe I could’ve . . . ah, I don’t know . . . done something to help.
>> 
>> **ZER0:** It is not your fault. / No one vanishes from sight / who wants to be found.

Atlas HQ is impressive.

Fiona hates herself for thinking it, but it is: the bright red polygonal tower before her stretches taller than any of the surrounding structures, and there’s something about the obvious age of the building—the outdated architecture, the brutalist exposed piping—that makes the accumulated history press on the eye. Atlas has been the heart of Meridian since before Meridian even existed, the surrounding metroplex grown out from the corporate colony; probably it’ll be here even after everybody is gone, the planet desiccated around it, leaving only its lonely logo glowing infinite solid-state red.

Rhys, thinks Fiona as she stands outside the building, will probably still be here with it.

She’s heard a lot about Maliwan’s attempted takeover, on her way here. About the destruction wrought by the hijacked Skywell, and about how everything had ended, here on Promethea; about how a ragtag group of vault hunters had taken out Katagawa and his whole elite strike force, landing the killing blow in the war.

That’s all anyone wants to talk about, but it’s not what’s Fiona’s been thinking about, cooped up in her berths aboard jump ships. No, she’s been thinking about how long they say the war lasted, and how it kept escalating, and how Atlas hadn’t backed down. She’s been thinking about Maliwan’s arrogance, and about how Katagawa must have believed that if only he’d pressed hard enough, postured big enough, Rhys would fold.

It’s an easy mistake to make, she supposes. The last time she’d seen Rhys he hadn’t looked much different from the way he had before Atlas’s booming success—still beanpole, still cursed with asymmetrical fashion and blessed with good looks. His CEO presence has never tended towards the imposing, and anyone might have looked his way and thought, _easy mark._

Fiona knows better. She knows what Rhys went through to get this company, and she knows—even now, when they haven’t spoken in almost two years—that there’s nothing and no one he’ll give it up for. Rhys will hold onto Atlas until his fingers bleed, until his very last breath; he’ll do whatever it takes, and it’s clear from the surrounding devastation—the carbon scoring on the surrounding buildings, the destroyed overpass off to her left, the bridge being repaired out over the water—that waging a war one of those things.

No wonder Katagawa had failed, if he hadn’t even taken the time to figure that out.

Somebody bumps past her shoulder, startling Fiona out of her thoughts. Around her the tiered promenade to the entrance bustles with businesspersons, all looking rather more unconcerned than the state of their planet would seem to warrant. Maybe they’ve gotten used to it, or maybe they’re just so relieved that the fighting is over that the only thing for it is to pretend that it didn’t happen at all. If so, the massive anti-aircraft turrets installed to both sides of the entrance give the lie to that fantasy: the mounts gleam amid the dirty gray of the old structure, and the targeting lasers flare occasionally at the edge of her vision.

All of which is irrelevant to why she’s here, and that’s the problem, isn’t it: she needs to stop stalling. It’s been at least twenty minutes since she got out of her taxi, and she’s definitely approaching the point at which no amount of sustained self-delusion will be sufficient to pretend that she’s merely appreciating the view. She needs to go inside and get this over with, before she totally psychs herself out.

Fiona takes a deep breath, and starts up the steps.

There’s a pair of Atlas troopers bracketing the row of glass doors—and doesn’t that just tell her everything, that Atlas has an army again—neither of whom move as she heads inside alongside a gaggle of suits. A few of the latter throw her startled looks, which she steadfastly ignores; she’s collected her fair share of those already, her well-worn travel gear entirely counter to the corporate dress code. Surrounded by sharp modern interior it makes her feel uncomfortably insignificant, a small-time con in the big city. Ridiculous, when she’s got more money than she knows what to do with, these days, and still; these aren’t her people. This isn’t her _world_ , in every sense of the term, and she feels like she’s moving against the grain of it, being pulled to somewhere she doesn’t belong.

It fails to keep her from progressing deeper into the lobby, a huge hexagonal space with a massive red _A_ connecting it to the tower. The middle bar of the _A_ serves as a foot bridge for the second floor, and the way the neon-edged balconies to both sides join with the sides creates the impression that the letter is holding the building up, Atlas holding up the proverbial sky.

Fiona aims for one of the glowing receptionist kiosks located beside each leg of the letter, moving with more surety than she feels. Clusters of corporate types idle around the floor, and she weaves around them, keeping her eyes on her goal. She’s not sure yet how best to introduce herself, but maybe she’ll keep it simple; hope that Rhys has the kind of people on staff that will take _he’ll want to see me_ seriously enough to put a message through, and not toss her out on the curb.

She’s half-way across the lobby when a voice cries, “ _Fiona!”_ cutting across the susurration of conversation that drifts over the floor.

She stops short. Around her, people look up; Fiona stands still, feeling—just for a moment—every inch the face on a wanted poster, with a dangerous number printed under her name.

Then somebody says, “Is that _Strongfork?”_ and she looks up, too.

When she sees him she almost laughs. Rhys is up on the central footbridge of the _A_ , leaned so far over the edge that his tie dangles comically over the railing and looking likely to follow it over himself. He’s staring right at her, wide-eyed, and her first thought is that his dress sense has slid _disastrously_ in the time she’s been gone, because he’s wearing a sleeveless windbreaker over a _button-down shirt._

Her second is that there’s no reason at all for her heart to do the stupid, breathtaking thing that it does, especially at the sight of somebody sporting a mustache like _that._

She tips back her hat, makes an exaggerated _oh-my-god-is-that-you?_ face, and jerks her head to indicate the ground floor. She doesn’t wave, because people are still staring, but Rhys gets the message: pulls sharply back, depositing himself back behind the railing, and disappears from view. The halted conversations around her resume, dedicating only a few curious sounds towards the brief spectacle, and Fiona adjusts her course towards the central arch of the A.

She’s only just reached her destination when Rhys shoves through the security checkpoint, visibly out of breath. He hurries towards her, and for a moment she thinks he’s going to hug her—he looks like he _wants_ to, hands jerking in an aborted gesture—but he only comes to a staggering stop before her, still staring like he doesn’t believe his own eyes. “ _Fiona_ ,” he gasps again, and then, “you’re _here_ , I’ve been—Zer0’s been— _we’ve_ been looking for you for ages, I was so worried, seriously,” before bending over to catch his breath, hands on his knees.

“What,” Fiona says flatly, “is on your _face_.”

Because of course that’s the first thing she says to him after two years.

Naturally.

Good one, Fiona.

“What?” he says, thrown, and unbends enough to see her incredulous look at his facial hair. “Oh, you mean my _siege-stache.”_ He puffs up, preening, then wilts a little under her blank stare. “What, you don’t like it?”

“Oh my god,” says Fiona, because if she’s started off this way she may as well commit to the point, “it looks like a baby thresher crawled onto your face and _died_. I can’t believe you did that on _purpose_.”

“Wow,” huffs Rhys. “Of course the the first thing you have to say to me after this long is making fun of my face. I don’t know what I was expecting.” When he looks up again his expression has gone odd and cracked-open, just on the verge of something more. “God, Fiona, I’m so glad you’re okay.”

That catches her off-guard, and her voice comes out thick, perfect match for the way his words have gone watery around the edges. “Missed you, too, Atlas.”

He does throw his arms around her, then.

He’s less bony than he used to be, sharp edges softened by that cushy CEO lifestyle, and he hugs her so hard she’s reminded of the grip strength of that robotic arm. “Lungs,” Fiona gasps, a trifle dramatically, “ _air_ , Rhys,” making him ease off just a little, and then, well.

Then it’s actually very nice.

“I thought,” he says, and she ignores, for both of their sakes, the damp sound he makes against her shoulder, ignores for her own the way the knot of emotion that’s been lodged in her chest twists around. “Damn it, I thought I might never see you again.”

“Guess it’s your lucky day,” she gets out.

“Guess it is.” He gives a breathy, uneven laugh, and she feels the accompanying shudder, the way his arms tighten briefly around her. For the space of a heartbeat she wants to squeeze him just as tightly back, to reassure and be reassured.

Instead she gives him an awkward pat on the shoulder, filled by a vague anticipatory dread. After a moment she adds, “You can let go of me, now”—not because she wants it to end, really, but because she’s scared that if they stay this way she’s going to end up saying everything she needs to tell him right here in the lobby, and none of it is meant for outsider ears.

“Oh,” Rhys says, “right,” and lets go, stepping back. Fiona feels the loss of his warmth with shocking acuteness, and tells herself that it’s just the contrast of the office space air conditioning, just like the glistening shine in his eyes is a trick of the fluorescents.

It’s hard to keep pretending when he says, “Where have you been, Fiona? What _happened?”_ his voice cracking audibly in the middle. “I was so busy with the damn war, I didn’t realize you’d left for good until it was too late, and I kept thinking, if only she’d come to me, if only she’d said something . . .” His eyes meet hers, and she’s startled to note that he’s replaced his ECHOeye again, the shimmering silver of the new lens catching the light like a coin in a fountain. “I could have helped. Whatever it was, I could have done something.”

Her throat feels tight all over again, and she says densely, “Not here. Somewhere with a little less”—she shrugs one shoulder, indicating the lobby at large—“through traffic.”

The look he gives her then is hard and discerning, wariness casting a mask over his features. “All right.” He sounds suddenly tired, and Fiona doesn’t know whether to be heartbroken or relieved by the fact that his heart is no longer out on his sleeve. It hurts, seeing him put those feelings away, but it’s easier, too: if she can’t see how her time away has touched him then she doesn’t have to think about how it has touched _her_ , or confront that knot in her chest. “Come on,” he gestures towards the central passageway, “we can talk in my office.”

Fiona nods, and follows him in.

His tone drops into something lighter as they make for the elevator, gratingly false in her ears. “You haven’t seen the new office yet, right? I think it was still being renovated the last time you were here—it’s super cool, wait ’til you see it, I had these fish tanks put in to get rid of all that empty space . . .”

She tells herself she doesn’t want the honesty back.

*

Rhys keeps talking about the renovations while the elevator takes them to the top floor, and Fiona hears about one word in ten, accomplishing an occasional encouraging monosyllable.

When they get off he leads her through the foyer—more sitting room than office, to Fiona’s eye—and then down a corridor walled by two monstrous fish tanks, the sort of thing she’d expect to see in a xenobotany exhibit on some far wealthier world. A school of colorful fish darts by as they pass, and Rhys says something enthusiastic about the coral—something about how hard it is to raise in captivity, news to Fiona, she thought coral were _rocks_ —and then they’re inside the office proper.

Which, okay: the new office actually _is_ pretty cool. “Huh,” Fiona says.

“Nice, right?”

“For an exercise in corporate greed, sure.” She quirks a skeptical brow, turning to take it all in. The room is enormous, with a central open space and raised platforms along the sides, walls lined with bookshelves that stretch all the way to the ceiling. Seating areas are scattered across the platforms, couches and chairs in cozy arrangements, and a third platform at the far end of the room pushes out past the full-length windows to create a glass box enclosure around a large desk. The bay of Meridian sparkles beyond, studded with the half-ruined skyline.

Rhys gives a rueful shake of his head. “Ouch. I should have seen that coming a mile off, huh.”

“Yep.”

He waves her towards a pair of cushioned chairs tucked into a corner between bookshelf and window, and starts towards his desk. “You can sit down, I’ll get the drinks. Been on your feet all day, right?”

“Hey, not all of us are accustomed to the sedentary lifestyle.” Just to prove the point, she follows him over. Her gaze roves curiously over the papered-over surface of the desk, taking in the empty coffee mugs and schematics, the toppled picture frame, the stack of books in the corner plastered with sticky notes bearing syllable-divided haiku.

Something about the lived-in mess jogs something else in her brain, and she’s struck by how odd it is for him to have been in the lobby to greet her. “Wait,” she says, as he produces a pair of tumblers out of a drawer, “what were you even doing downstairs?” Suspicion blooms in her mind, his peculiar timely arrival running headlong into the memory of the ID-readers she’d had to check through back at the shuttleport. “Are you—have you been tracking me?”

The question sounds paranoid, even to her own ears, but Rhys flinches. “Not _tracking_ , exactly, just . . . on alert. I’d been looking for you, okay? I was worried.” He avoids her gaze while he rummages for the alcohol. “Zer0 has all the commercial transportation systems around here bugged, and once you got in range of the building’s scanners . . .”

“Wow,” Fiona says, “that doesn’t make me feel violated at all,” but she can’t muster any real bite. When Rhys lifts an expensive-looking bottle of scotch out of the drawer, she adds, “If you pour that quickly enough, I might even forget the creepy semi-stalking.”

“It’s not _stalking_ ,” he says plaintively, and rounds the desk.

They abscond to the corner he’d indicated before, Fiona taking the chair that’s backed against the bookshelves so she has the best view. Rhys sits down across, setting the glasses on the table to pour their drinks. While he does Fiona looks out the window, the ruined bridge across the bay drawing her eye: what’s left of it juts skeletal over the water, and she catches the glint of what must be constructor bots drifting in the air around it, like slow-moving immense silver bees.

Rhys brings her attention back to the room by holding out a glass towards her. “This is the good stuff,” he promises, and then—before Fiona can so much as open her mouth to say _Like you’d know_ —adds, “based on the fact that it was a gift from Montgomery Jakobs. There was a CEO who knew his way around his liquor. And his business.” Fiona raises her brows, accepting her glass with a trifle more respect. “Damn the COV.”

“Amen,” she says blandly, mostly to the latter, because a business mogul with a good reputation is a business mogul still. She holds her tumbler briefly over the table, and Rhys grins, clinking his glass against hers.

The scotch burns harsh on the back of her tongue when she tips back her glass, spicy-sweet, which she takes to mean that Rhys—and her own eye for anything worth more than the average working man’s daily paycheck—had it right: Montgomery Jakobs _did_ know his liquor. She savors it, and kicks her legs up on the low table, partly to see the look on Rhys’s face (“ _Hey!”_ he says) and partly in the hope that it’ll persuade the knotted muscles in her back to untense.

She’s deeply tempted to tip her hat down over her eyes and stay that way, but when she looks over at Rhys he’s watching her with that same guarded expression he’d had down in the lobby, silver eye glinting in the low light. “So,” he says, “about the disappearing thing.”

“Yeah,” Fiona says, and she _is_ tired, suddenly, all that jump lag caught up to her at once, seeping fatigue all the way into her bones. “About that.” She closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath, giving herself one last reprieve. “You’re not gonna like this.”

“Fiona.” The pain in Rhys’s voice snaps her eyes open. “I _didn’t like_ losing you. I _didn’t like_ thinking that you might be dead, and that I’d been too goddamn wrapped up in running my company to help one of my closest friends.” The corners of his mouth are pinched in a frown. “Whatever it is, it’s still going to be better than that.”

“Okay,” Fiona says, her throat dry. “Okay.”

She’s had this conversation with him in her head a hundred times over, but none of the ways she’d imagined beginning seem to fit now. Fine, then; Fiona’s been telling stories for as long as she’s been alive, spinning tall tales to entertain Sasha, to string along marks, to keep herself going even when the going gets hard. She can wing it, just like she always does.

That’s what she’s good at, after all.

“You remember when you showed me Atlas’s vault . . .?”

*

Rhys’s voice message had reached her on her way back from Menoetius, brief and excited: _Come to Promethea the next time you guys are in this sector, okay? I finally have the new headquarters up and running, and—well, never mind. But you’re gonna want to see this, trust me, Fiona_. The rest had been instructions on how to get in touch once she got on-planet, no explanation of why she ought to drop everything and head his way.

Not exactly illuminating, but the anticipation in his voice had set off all of Fiona’s freshly-honed vault hunter reflexes at once. So she’d bid a temporary farewell to Athena and Janey at the Aquator orbital station, promised to report back whatever she found, and taken the next jump ship out to Promethea, her own curiosity grown to fever-pitch.

All of which means that there’s really no one to blame but herself for the fact that she’s just spent nearly two hours jostling around on cramped subway trains and stumbling through subterranean tunnels, rather than kicking back on the beach.

Sometimes Fiona really questions her choice of career. (Also, she still intends to blame Rhys.)

What she’s found, though—

She stands on a high platform, bright with unearthly red glow. The space before her is staggeringly immense, doubly so after the cramped underground of Meridian; a flight of steps at her feet leads down into a chamber that stretches away for hundreds of feet, lined with huge pillars rising to a far-distant ceiling. Beyond the pillars the walls are inlaid with glowing geometry, and at the very far end of the chamber the walls jut out into gargantuan steps, curving together to form a tiered apse.

And there, atop an elevated platform within the apse: looms an arch, a gate leading nowhere at all.

 _No fucking way,_ Fiona thinks.

“You made it!”

She manages to tear her gaze away from the arch, eyes falling towards the source of the sound. Atlas equipment and floodlights are scattered down the length of the chamber, and she spots Rhys waving to her from beside a small cluster of robots gathered around a low platform in the room’s center. There’s no other _people_ in sight, she notes in passing; save for Rhys it’s all robots, various models of laborer and scientific equipment. What looks like a heavily-modified loader bot sits off to the side, its watchful red eye turned her way.

Rhys parts from the group to meet her, hurrying towards the steps. His face is open, flushed-happy, and he looks like he’s still riding the same new discovery high that’s buzzing inside Fiona. He spreads his arms to gesture broadly at the chamber, grinning as she jogs down the steps. “So, what do you think?”

“What the fuck!” says Fiona, by way of answer. She stops at the bottom, a little winded. “I can’t _believe_ you found another vault before I did. I spend five years hauling ass around the galaxy in search of Eridian ruins, and you just stumble across a vault right next to your new HQ?”

“Well, actually—” He breaks off when she punches him in the arm. “ _Oww! Why_ , Fiona! God, I forgot you’re such a _sore loser_ —”

“ _How_ ,” she demands.

“Seriously, that really hurts! And I was getting to that, okay? If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t exactly trip over it. It was in Atlas’s files.” A wave of his silver hand indicates what Fiona presumes is the general direction of the corporate headquarters. “Old Atlas found it when they first arrived on the planet, but they couldn’t open it without the key, so they paved over it. Wanted to keep anyone else from nosing around, you know.”

“That . . . was probably a good call.” Fiona narrows her eyes. “Wait. Is that why you chose to set up here? It was, wasn’t it! You _knew_ Atlas hid another vault!” _And didn’t tell me_ , hangs unspoken.

“No!” Rhys looks affronted, then a little guilty. “I mean, that wasn’t the _only_ reason.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Atlas sanitized most of their records when they went under, but there was some stuff I found in Old Haven . . . nothing specific, you know, just vague mentions, references to missing files. Stuff too obscure for their scorched-earth algorithm to catch, but enough to realize something was off.”

Fiona gets it. “You could tell there was a hole.”

“Yeah. It was pretty clear they’d left something big back on the homeworld, and I was already considering relocating our operations here, so . . .” Rhys trails off, then appears to remember his initial point. “Anyway, it’s not like I didn’t work for it! I vault hunted! It just happened to be the ‘spending six months cross-referencing data mined from the mainframe’ sort of vault hunting, instead of the ‘running around getting shot at’ kind.” He pulls a face. “Sorry, but I’ve had enough of that to last a lifetime.”

Fiona smirks. “You know, I’m not sure it counts, otherwise.”

“Yeah, well, if you knew anything about data warehousing you’d be, like, _super_ impressed right now.”

She probably would be, actually, but before she can respond a bright voice says, “Wow, she’s here! Aren’t you going to introduce us?” from somewhere in the vicinity of her knees.

She looks down, and is startled to find herself faced with a familiar little round robot, no larger than a beach ball and teeth-rottingly cute. “Rhys! Did you find another Gortys?” The shiny Atlas-red paint job is new, but otherwise the resemblance is complete.

“No, no,” Rhys hurries to say, “this is—”

“I’m Bertha!” the robot informs her, “and he didn’t find me, he built me!” Fiona is treated to happy eyes, both apertures displaying upturned half moons.

Rhys beams down at the new arrival. “Bertha, this is Fiona, the old friend I told you about. Fiona, please meet the Head of Atlas’s newly-formed Vault Research division.”

“You made a robot the head of a department?” Fiona is only slightly incredulous; that _does_ sound like something he’d do.

“Yes, he did!” Bertha bobs.

“I did,” he agrees, “you know, for security. Bertha won’t sell Atlas’s secrets, no matter what.”

“No, I won’t,” confirms Bertha, this time with utmost seriousness.

Fiona can’t help her smile. “I’m sure you’ll do a wonderful job.”

“Thank you! Oh, I’m so excited to finally meet you.” Bertha rolls a small, eager circle at Fiona’s feet. “Rhys talks about you a _lot_.”

“Not a _lot_ ,” Rhys mumbles.

“Does he, now.” Fiona crosses her arms. “And what does he say about me?”

“That you’re a really cool vault hunter! And that you opened the Vault of the Traveler together! And that he misses you,” Bertha reports. “Especially that last one.”

Rhys clears his throat, loudly. “ _Thank you,_ Bertha, I’ll take it from here.” Over Bertha’s protestations, he assures Fiona, “She’s exaggerating, seriously,” before waving for her to follow. “Come on, I’ll show you what we’ve found.”

Fiona magnanimously lets that one go. She and Bertha trail after Rhys, the little robot close on his heels. Bertha swivels her top half back towards Fiona as they head towards the platform being investigated by her compatriots, explaining, “There’s some kind of power source under the pedestal! Rhys is _very_ excited about it.”

“Uh, yeah, I _am_ ,” Rhys says, without turning around, “’cause it’s _awesome_. It’s the first working piece of tech we’ve found down here!”

As they approach the the platform Fiona sees that the gathered robots are mostly various types of recorder, presumably working to scan and document the intricate patterns that gleam half-visible across the platform’s surface. It’s perhaps three meters to a side, with a small triangular recess in its center, the same hazy red glow that comes from the walls filtering out from within.

Bertha wheels past it to a low work table set up nearby, Bertha-height. “Everybody, take a break! _Fiona_ is here. Rhys wants to show her around.”

There’s a low excited chirping from the assembled robots—Fiona catches her name multiple times—and then they clear off the platform towards Bertha, rolling or weaving through the air. Fiona watches them decamp, and then asks, “Have you told _anyone_ about this place? Anyone who isn’t a robot, I mean.”

Rhys stops beside the platform, looking down at his feet. “Not yet. I’m thinking about keeping it all in-house, you know? Don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

“You mean vault hunters.” She comes to stand alongside. “Is that why Zer0 isn’t here with you?”

Rhys gives a noncommittal shrug. “I’ll . . . tell them eventually. Zer0 has my back. I just—wanted you to see it first.” He glances her way, mouth twitching with an unsuppressed smile. “We’re a team, right?”

“Yeah,” Fiona says, an odd warmth coiling inside her breast. “Yeah, we are.”

“So! Check this out.” Rhys steps up onto the platform. Intrigued, Fiona follows suit. She wants to get a closer look at that glowing recess, to see whether there’s any indication as to what it’s for.

The stone beneath them— _shifts._

Startled, she flings her arms out for balance; Rhys does the same. A deep rumble emanates suddenly from under their feet, a dangerous vibration seizing the platform. “Is that normal?!” she demands.

Rhys looks spooked. “Uh, no, that’s _definitely_ new!”

Fiona doesn’t need to be told twice: she tears off her pack, and goes straight for her grappling hook, just in case the whole floor’s about to collapse, or _something_. This is ancient Eridian shit they’re dealing with, here; she’s not about to take chances.

While she wrestles it out of her bag Rhys spins around to shout at his robotic assembly. “Bertha! I need everybody over here and recording, _right now!”_ Bertha makes affirmative noises, sending her crew of hovering robots back over.

Which is how Fiona finds herself standing atop a vibrating stone platform with a grappling hook in her hand and a swarm of camera drones jostling around her shoulders, Rhys across from her with his arms pulled warily in towards his torso, all of them looking down.

Mercifully, the floor _doesn’t_ collapse—Fiona’s had about enough of that particular aspect of Eridian ruins—but the triangular recess in the platform center does glow suddenly brighter. After a moment, a stone column starts to rise out, more smoothly than the sound of grinding stone would suggest.

“Huh,” Fiona says. She lowers her hook.

“I—what?” Rhys says, staring at the column. Then his eyes fall on what she’s holding. “Is that a _grappling hook?_ You seriously just carry one of those around?”

“Yes?” Fiona gives him a blank look. “I hunt Eridian artifacts for a living, of course I carry a grappling hook.”

“Wow.” Rhys looks caught between awe and annoyance. “That’s—okay, that’s pretty cool, I guess.”

Even as he says it, the rising column reaches its terminus, stopping around chest-height. The platform ceases shaking; both of them straighten, and Fiona leans forward to get a proper look at the top of the column. There, too, she finds a recess, only this one isn’t empty; sitting inside is the shattered fragment of something cylindrical, silvery cracks spreading out from a dim inner core.

She reaches for it, but Rhys says, “ _Wait_ ,” shooting her a look that says, _Don’t you remember what happened last time?_ (Fiona has to concede the point.)

Rhys waves over one of the bots; the camerabot zips in close, aiming its lens into the recess. A flick of his right wrist turns on his hand-projector, displaying the camerabot’s point of view, and Fiona sees that what she’d mistaken for cracks is actually intricate circuitry, branching into the cylinder.

Even as she starts to formulate a similar thought, Rhys says, “Is it me, or does that look like—”

“It’s a key fragment!” Bertha exclaims, and Fiona glances over her shoulder to see the little robot surrounded by several projected screens of her own, one of them showing the same view from the drone. Bertha’s eyes do the happy half-moon expression again. “Wow, you weren’t kidding about Fiona being amazing. She just got here, and she already activated the key pedestal, and found a piece of the key!”

“What, just by _being here?”_

“I don’t know!” Bertha says, with the same indefatigable enthusiasm as everything else she’s said so far. “That would be something, wouldn’t?”

Fiona frowns down at the pedestal. “If it’s a key fragment, what’s it doing here? Someone tried to open the gate with just part of the key?”

“Given how desperate Atlas was to open another vault after they found their first one, I wouldn’t put it past them. Or maybe they just thought it was as good a hiding place as any, once they decided to seal the place, I don’t know.” Rhys shakes his head. “Bertha, call down a containment bot to pack this thing up and take it back to the lab. I want to run it through the mass spectrometer right away.”

“Already on it, Rhys.” Bertha rolls away, talking into her comm.

He powers down his projector, and looks up at Fiona. “This is—this is weird, right? I mean, what are the odds that it would open only for you?”

“Or only for the two of us.” Fiona, for her part, is thinking about the facility under Old Haven; about the fact that Atlas built a single key in two pieces, and that Gortys could only be assembled by two people working in tandem. Would any of it have been possible if only one of them had picked up the key down in that Old Atlas bunker? She doesn’t think so.

(She’s wondered about that a lot, in the years since they found the vault. Had whoever built Gortys wanted a guarantee that they wouldn’t be cut out of the deal? Had Atlas had something else in mind, or had it all just been the result of a corporate penchant for melodrama? With Atlas having been racing the clock to get Gortys running she can’t imagine their wasting time on form without function. There must have been a reason, a purpose, some narrative that she can’t see.

She’s wondered almost as often whether either of them would have made it back, had they gone inside the Vault of the Traveler alone.)

Rhys halts mid-step on his way off the platform. “ _I_ . . . hadn’t thought of that.” With exaggerated care, he lowers his foot back to the stone. “Maybe we’d better wait here. Yeah.”

So they do, idling on the slab until the lab transport robot summoned by Gortys arrives and collects the key, bearing it away inside a Faraday cage suspended by tractor beam. Excessive, Fiona thinks, but then again: she’s never actually touched an _Eridian_ vault key before. Who knows what it might do? Rhys is probably right to be careful.

When they finally get off the platform the central column retracts, sinking back into the stone. Bertha and her helpers promptly gather around it again, carrying on a highly technical discussion that Fiona doesn’t even try to parse; Rhys leaves them to it, and the two of them wander away from the bustle, further into the chamber.

Fiona’s feet carry her inevitably towards the arch, and she lets them; even if the arch is dead now—even if it’ll never be anything else, without that key—there’s something about it that makes her want to get a closer look.

In the end they wind up sitting side by side on a pile of crates near the apse, feet hanging down. Fiona looks up at the arch, and imagines it serving its purpose; leading to monsters, to treasure, to Eridians once knew what else. Doing what it was built to do.

After a while, she says, “You’re not going to do it. Right?”

Rhys—leaned back on his hands, looking up along with her—breathes a soft sigh. “No,” he says at length, “I’m not. Releasing a monster like the Traveler here, under the city? It’d be a disaster. I know that.” And, with a hint of pride, “Besides, Atlas doesn’t need another vault to get ahead. Whatever’s in there . . . isn’t for us to find out.”

He still sounds wistful, and Fiona thinks she knows exactly how he feels. “But you wonder, anyway.”

“Well, yeah.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him smile. “Imagine us, opening another vault. How many people have ever been inside more than one?”

“Nobody living.” Fiona considers this. “Typhon DeLeon, maybe. If he’s still out there somewhere.”

“What, two decades on, after that kind of superstar fame? There’s no way.”

“Probably not. But it would make a good story.”

Rhys bumps her shoulder with his own. “So would we.”

Behind them, Bertha coordinates the extraction circus, a cacophony of robotic voices and beeping. Before them the arch towers into the dark, promising a story to rival the last one, this time one Fiona will never be able to tell. For a moment, though, all she’s aware of is Rhys.

She doesn’t argue the point.

*

“And after that,” Fiona says, frowning into her glass, “is when the nightmares started.”

“Nightmares?” Rhys stirs from where he’s leaned on his left elbow. His own glass sits empty on the table.

“Dreams, I guess, but they were—you know.” She gives an irritable wave of her hand. “Vault dreams.” She doesn’t like saying it, because maybe if she doesn’t acknowledge it then it doesn’t have to be true. “Every night while I was on Promethea, every few nights after that. It showed me myself, finding the key fragments. One inside inside a high mountain temple, another in a deep chasm. I’d never seen either of those places before, but I’m telling you, I could’ve looked them up on the ECHOnet, they were so clear.”

Rhys looks enlightened. “Athenas! And Epitah.” At her confused glance, he explains, “My intelligence division spent ages listening in on Katagawa, and the Crimson Raiders once they arrived— _don’t_ give me that look, allies aren’t supposed to keep secrets, their transmissions weren’t even _encrypted_ , what was I supposed to do—anyway, the point is, that’s where they found the fragments! Lilith’s people looted theirs out of a temple on Athenas, and Maliwan tracked the last third to an Eridian ruin on Epitah.” He shoots her an excited stare. “It really showed you where they were!”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I didn’t look either of those places up,” Fiona says, her tone dry. It helps conceal how chilled she is to hear him say it: she’d known they weren’t regular dreams—her dreams aren’t so specific, aren’t about vault minutiae—but until that moment she’d been able to cling to the hope that she might be wrong, that Rhys would look at her like she’s losing her mind.

Being right makes the next part much worse.

The look she receives is every bit as incredulous as she’d hoped, albeit tied to precisely the opposite source: “You weren’t even a _little_ curious?”

“No! I mean, _yes_ , obviously, but _no_ , because then I would’ve known where they _were_.” Of course he won’t do her the favor of connecting the remaining dots on his own. Fiona’s supposed to be good at this, at planting an idea and convincing the mark that they came up with it on their own, but as always Rhys has to be the exception. “And I didn’t want that, ’cause the next thing it showed me? Was me putting the key together, and giving it to _you_.”

She can actually see the color drain from his face. It makes her want to stop talking, but she if she doesn’t say it all in one go she’s not going to say it at all, so she barrels on. “I’d give you the key, and then—”

“And then you’d see me,” Rhys interrupts, looking ill, “go down into the basilica, and use it to open the vault. Right?” It’s plain he’s having his own moment of wanting desperately to be wrong.

If ever there was a time to finish her drink, Fiona decides, that time is now. She tips back her glass, draining the remaining dregs. “Yeah.”

Rhys’s breath leaves him in one distressed rush. “I had—the same dream. The second half, anyway.” He looks down at his hands, turned palm-up against his knees. “All the time, until the Raiders did their thing. I’d walk down there, and put the key on the pedestal, and then watch as the gate opened.” He glances sharply up. “Wait. You left because of _that?”_

“Because I thought that if I stuck around it was going to happen, yeah! Vaults don’t screw around—okay, _all_ they do is screw around, but I wasn’t gonna let this one screw _me_.” This comes out louder than she intends; she grimaces, and lowers her voice. “I thought at first I could just—stay off Promethea, you know? Stop by once in a while, ignore the weird dreams. Swing by again after the next job. I didn’t think you were lying, when you said you weren’t going to try.”

“But? I can tell there’s a ‘but’ there, Fiona.”

“But.” The words feel leaden on her tongue. “Then you went to war.”

“What does that have to do with it?” Rhys’s eyebrows knit together. “I mean, Maliwan wanted the vault, but it’s not like I’d have opened it for them. That’s, like, _why_ we went to war.”

“I thought,” she says blandly, as blandly as she can, “that if that’s what it took to save Atlas—you might.” She shrugs, more cavalier than she feels. “I know you, all right? I know how much this company means to you. I thought, if it really came down to it—yeah. Maybe you’d even do that.”

 _And I’d help you,_ she means to say, because that, right there, is at the heart of why she left—

—but the hurt in his face is so plain that the words die in her throat, dismay running like a crack through his expression.

He sounds like she’s knocked the wind out of him. “You really think I . . . ?”

And Fiona’s a good liar—a good _con_ , well-practiced at lies and half-truths—and still, for all her expertise, for all her practice at telling whatever story she’s got to tell in service to her happy ending, she tells the truth. “You just fought a _war_ for this company.” It’s sharp as razor-blades, and isn’t that just her all over: smiling nice at her enemies, and then turning with a mouth full of teeth on her friends. “Maybe you don’t see the destruction out there, going past it every day, but I do. Everybody who used to live in those bombed-out apartments, or work in those crumbled towers, you can bet they do, too.”

“You think I don’t—” Rhys chokes back a laugh, angry-stunned. “This is _my city_ , Fiona. I can see the damage Maliwan did _just fine._ ” He sounds pissed, now, and that’s better: Fiona can handle a pissed-off Rhys, anytime. It’s his looking like a kicked puppy that cuts her off at the knees, especially when she’s to blame.

Her own anger is rising to match, anyway, squeezing past that stupid knot in her chest. “Maliwan didn’t have this war with itself, Rhys!” She hates herself for getting angry, hates him for making this conversation necessary at all, hates that when it comes to the two of them nothing can ever be simple _._ “It’s still the same old story! Two corporations slugging it out, and everyone else getting ground under their boots. How many people do you think died during your siege? A thousand? Ten thousand?” Her hands clench around her glass. “What’s your maximum acceptable number, so long as Atlas came out on top?”

“It isn’t like that!” Rhys is scowling, his robotic hand closing into a fist against his knee. “I’ve built something here, okay? The people of Meridian _trust_ the new Atlas. People went out there and fought for us because we’re in this _together_ , because I’m—I _was_ —working on making this a better place. Before Katagawa came and started blowing shit up!”

“You didn’t answer the question!”

“Damn it, Fiona!” The outburst is accompanied by a sudden push to his feet, Rhys pacing fiercely away. “You think that doesn’t keep me up at night? That I don’t think about the number of innocent people who got caught in the crossfire? Because I do, okay. _All the time._ I think about it when I get up in the morning, I think about it when my construction teams tell me how many bodies they’ve identified in the rubble, I think about it in meetings with the damn board.” He gestures vehemently with his robotic hand as he talks, then spins around, coming to grip the back of his chair with both hands. “What would you have me do? Throw away everything we’re doing, everything we’ve done, and let Maliwan make this place a shithole again? I have a responsibility to these people. Not just to Atlas, to _Meridian_ , to make up for what Old Atlas did.” His exhale is rough, and his next words bear a familiar mulish tone, one that Fiona knows means he’s not backing down until somebody knocks him out cold. “Atlas abandoned this planet once. I’m not letting that happen again.”

That—gives her pause. For a moment they stare at each other, and then Fiona says, “That’s _not_ what this is about,” in the same moment he says, “I want to show you something,” overlapping each other.

“What?” she says, thrown, but he just turns away towards his desk, not waiting to see if she’s coming. She can’t imagine what it could be, but she stands, anyway, and follows him to that glass box.

He’s already punching a long code into a panel on one of the drawers as she catches up, fast enough that even her well-honed con reflexes don’t catch the full string. Her eyebrows climb when that’s not the last of the drawer’s security: a segment of the desk flips over, revealing a palm-reader and a retina scanner, and Rhys presses his human palm to the former, then leans forward to let the scan flick over his organic eye. Finally he opens yet _another_ display on his palm, entering one last password without any gestures at all, ECHOeye flaring silver.

“Paranoid, much?” mutters Fiona. She still leans forward with interest, curiosity piqued. She’s a vault hunter, after all; well-guarded treasures are a matter of professional interest.

The surety with which Rhys had gone through unlocking the drawer seems to evaporate the moment he grips the handle. A flicker of uncertainty crosses his face, and the corner of his mouth tweaks into a pout. “Don’t—yell at me when you see this, all right? I’m showing you for a reason.”

“Yeah, ’cause that totally fills me with confidence.” She puts up her hands at his insistent stare. “Fine, I won’t yell, at least for as long as it takes you to explain yourself. After that, no promises.”

“Fine,” Rhys says, and pulls the drawer open.

For a moment Fiona can’t tell what she’s looking at, blinking uncomprehendingly at the contents. Lying in a depression at the center of the black velvet interior is a translucent blue circle the size of her thumbnail, a set of wires trailing away from it into the desk. Then it clicks. “Is that your old ECHOeye?” She frowns in consternation. “What’s it doing here?”

“It is.” Rhys hasn’t moved, hand still on the handle, and she can feel how rigidly tense he is now that the drawer is open. It makes her wary, not knowing what’s got him so abruptly wound. “I kept it, after I—” he mimics the motion with his left hand; the thoughtless specificity of the gesture makes Fiona feel sick. “Well. I kept it. That’s,” he takes another deep breath, like he’s steeling himself for what he’s about to say, “that’s Jack.”

“What!” The word bursts out of her at volume, despite her earlier promise. She takes an involuntary step back, then another, suddenly unsure of him, of this office, of everything that’s passed between them. “Rhys, what the _hell._ ”

His eyes are wide. “You promised you’d let me explain!”

Cold dread pools in Fiona’s gut, but he looks so _scared—_ by what? By her _backing away?_ —that she stops. Her voice comes out flat: “You have ten seconds to make that make sense to me.”

“Okay. Okay.” He runs his human hand nervously through his hair, casting the artfully messy look into hopeless disarray. “It’s a reminder, okay? Of how close I am to—being him. A hand’s breadth, right?” His robotic hand splays over the desk, demonstrating the literal distance. “I keep him to remind myself to not forget the little people, to remember that the end doesn’t justify the means. He . . . before I got him out, we talked about Helios. About what I’d done, and how I could live with it, and how he’d justified so many of his own actions in the same way.” A shaky inhalation. “So it’s a reminder. To not make excuses, even to myself. If I can sit here, every day, with him right under my hand, and not do what he would—maybe I can do better.” The look he gives her is nearly pleading. “I’m not him, Fiona. I’m trying not to be, all the time.”

The knot in her chest rends open.

All the emotion that’s been pent up inside slops right out, and it feels like—like slamming a shot of Promethean fire whiskey, heat filling her up and the world tilting and then righting itself again. She wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, or wrap her arms around him and hold him, or maybe punch him again in the neck. It’s all a little confusing.

Very slowly, she says, “That . . . is _really_ morbid.”

“Is it?” Rhys looks a little taken aback, and still utterly unsure, like he thinks she might bolt from his office at any moment. Standing behind his desk he looks oddly small, lone man against the boundless broken cityscape behind him. “Look, Fiona, I’m just trying to say—I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have opened the vault, even if all of Atlas depended on it.”

“ _Damn_ it.” Her sharp tone makes him flinch, but she presses on, “Of course you’re not him! This, all of this—the war with Maliwan, whether you’d open the vault—none of that is why I left. Fuck!” And she could laugh, she could scream, _something_ , some grandiose expression of frustration, “It’s always like this with us, isn’t it? We meet, and then I’m me, and you’re you, and an hour later we’ve been bickering for so long that neither of us even remember what the argument was about. Well, not this time.” She steps forward until she’s standing directly across from him, hands coming down on the edge of the desk. “What I’ve been trying to say—the whole reason I left—is that, if it had came down to it, I _would have helped you_. If what you needed was for me to find and give you that stupid key, I would have, and _that’s_ why I left.”

For a moment the silence stretches between them, taut as a rubber band. Then it snaps:

“Are you—are you saying we’re _too good a team?”_

“I mean—yeah? Yeah.” Fiona pushes back off the desk. “It knew that about us, right? It knew what we’d done. What we _could_ do.” Thoughtfully, she adds, “Typical vault bullshit.”

Rhys is motionless behind his desk, the air between them tense, and Fiona—

Fiona thinks, _Fuck it._ Fuck it, because talking isn’t getting her anywhere; with him it never does, because for all her way with words she can never get any of the the important ones in the right order, and she can’t leave this unsaid any longer. Needs to get the emotion jamming her ribcage out into the world, into meaning or action or both.

So.

She steps around the desk, and drags him into a kiss.

Rhys makes a startled sound as she pulls him in, and for a single terrifying moment she’s the only one doing the kissing; but a fraction of a second later he catches up, and kisses her back like maybe it’s been on his mind. Like maybe this conversation has been wearing on his patience, too; like maybe this time it’s _her_ who’s been slow on the uptake, and he’s just been waiting for her to catch up.

Fiona thinks she could live with that, even if she normally prefers beating him to the punch.

It’s a pretty great kiss, all things considered. No doubt it’s all that pent-up frustration: Fiona’s been waiting to do this for a long goddamn time. Finally giving up her restraint is bound to feel good, even with that awful mustache prickling her lip.

Really it’s good enough that if it were up to her they’d keep going, but Rhys pulls suddenly back, breathless, barely far enough that she can’t feel the warmth of his lips on her own. He gasps, “Wait, Fiona, is this—look, I just need to know, is this a one-time thing? Because if it is, I, uh,” a hitching note of panic enters his voice, “I don’t think I can deal? With that.”

“No!” Her hands tighten where they’re fisted in his lapels. “ _No_. The next time some two-bit Maliwan bastard comes after you, I want to be there.” An old anger licks at her insides, and for a moment all she feels is vicious vindication, deeply glad that Katagawa Jr. is dead. “Next time, they’re going to have to go through _me_.”

“Oh,” he says, in a small voice.

And Fiona can’t deal with the relief she hears there, or the genuine uncertainty it replaces; so she does the only thing she can think of, and kisses him again, fiercely, trying to get across everything she still can’t seem to put into words. About how angry she’d been, listening to his message about what Katagawa had done; about how afraid she’d been of herself, and of the two of them together, and the fact that she’d known—in the dead certain way of a story—that she’d cared less for this entire planet than she had for him, and had dreaded finding herself with that blood on her hands.

(That’s something the two of them have in common, she thinks: wanting the things that they want so much that they’ll smash up everything and everyone in their orbit to get them, or keep them. Sometimes that means felling a space station with ten thousand aboard, and other times it means blasting a good-hearted robot to bits to protect somebody’s kid sister, and every time it means that neither of them know how to _stop._ They’re dangerous, a risk to everybody around them, the impact of their decisions outsized. _Meteoritic_ , by the craters they leave in other people’s lives.

Maybe that means they’re worth each other.)

When they part again—a blessed micro-eternity later—Fiona leans her forehead against his shoulder, and says, softly, “I’m sorry I left without saying. I’m sorry I thought the worst of you.” She wishes she could blame the vault for that part, too, but whatever the vault may have shown them, it’s her belief that it was the truth that so hurt them. “You deserved better.”

“It’s okay.” Rhys breathes a shaky laugh. “I’ve—kind of screwed up a lot. I would have doubted me, too.” A slow intake of breath, his chest rising and falling against her own. “Honestly, Fiona, I’m glad you did. If you’d actually found the key fragments—if you’d offered . . .” He trails off, and takes a moment to start again. “You always call me out on my bullshit. I trust you to do that, so don’t—don’t _stop_.”

Which is too much all over again, and reminds her of the other truth she _really_ needs him to accept, preferably sooner rather than later. Humor sparks dangerously in her ribcage, and she pulls back just far enough for him to see that she’s wearing her most dead-serious face. “Just so you know,” she deadpans, “this is happening _despite_ the mustache. You look like a used car salesman. That crime against facial hair’s _gotta_ go.”

“God,” Rhys snorts, looking away, “you’re such an asshole, _why_ am I even in love with you—”

And seems to realize, mid-sentence, what’s just come out of his mouth.

The look he gives her is deer-in-the-headlights alarmed, his left hand pressing closed-fist against his lips. Fiona—her heart speeding to a joyous, traitorous double-time in her chest—takes back any doubts she may have had about who is the slow one between them.

“Yeah,” she says, aware that her own expression is going the way of a sappy, embarrassing grin. “That’s kind of what I was getting at, too.”

It takes him a moment to get it.

When he does, the smile that sneaks edgewise across his face—half-hidden by where he’s still pressing his knuckles against his mouth—makes her feel better than any vault treasure she’s ever uncovered.

This time, when the kissing resumes, there are no more interruptions.


End file.
